The New Pictures

Body and Soul (Enterprise; United Artists) is a catchy but not very relevant title for a picture about prize fighting. The body is symbolized by materialistic Hazel Brooks and the soul by idealistic Lilli Palmer.

The story: a Jewish boy (John Garfield) of New York's Lower East Side, short on money and long on push, graduates from the amateur fighter class and travels fast. The faster he travels, the dirtier the racket gets. He is disgusted, but in his vanity and his desire for money he rationalizes about the general ugliness of the ringside business, and thus alienates his mother (Anne Revere) and his sweetheart (Lilli Palmer). He agrees to throw his last fight before retiring, but recovers his integrity in time, whales hell out of his opponent and wins back Miss Palmer.

This rather conventional story, shaded with stout "socially conscious" sentiments against commercial ruthlessness, is turned into an unusual movie by Abraham Polansky's taut continuity and sharp dialogue, by Robert Rossen's solid directing, and by Cameraman James Wong Howe's vivid shots of fighting. A good deal of the picture has the cruelly redolent illusion of reality that distinguished many of the movies of low life made in the early '30s.

Several of the performances are first-rate. Canada Lee plays with dignity and fervor one of the few thoroughly unpatronizing screen roles ever given a Negro. Lilli Palmer is a sensitive and lovely actress. John Garfield, having dropped some of his Dead End mannerisms, gives a good performance that is as hard and simple as a rock.

Body and Soul is no major screen achievement, but it expertly holds a steady pitch of interest and excitement.

Fun and Fancy Free (Walt Disney; RKO Radio) is another Disney movie that mixes cartoons and live actors. The master of ceremonies is Jiminy Cricket (voice by Cliff Edwards), a faintly oppressive optimist who tries to sell the audience on the debatable idea that in these troubled days the best thing one can do is laugh at cartoons and listen to Dinah Shore. As it turns out, one could do a lot worse.

Once Jiminy has quit selling, the invisible Miss Shore tells and sings quite a pleasant little yarn about one Bongo (original story by Nobel Prizewinner Sinclair Lewis). Bongo is a small circus bear who answers the call of the wild on his unicycle, finds that he is a bit soft and urban for life in the raw, falls for a sexy little taupe she-bear, and engages a gigantic rival in slapstick battle for her paw.

In the second half of the picture, Edgar Bergen and dummies, in Technicolor, tell a little girl (Luana Patten) a cartooned variant of the Jack & the Beanstalk story. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Goofy, after a first-rate sequence as starving peasants, are lifted into the sky by a magic plant. There they meet Willie the Giant, outwit him (no hard job), and rescue a captive heroine.

In spite of the Disney technical skill, it has never been a very good idea to mix cartoons and live actors. With genial showmanship, Mr. Bergen & Co. barely manage to save their part of the show. Most of the Bongo section is just middle-grade Disney, not notably inspired. And once Mickey & friends get involved with Willie, the whole picture peters out and becomes as oddly off-balance and inconsequential as its title.

Good fun: the oafish, back-country bears who watch the Bongo triangle square itself. Top-drawer Disney: various dreamlike bits of flowing, beautifully planned motion (notably Bongo's love-dream and the climax of his fight); the marvelously oily thrusting and gropings of the magical plant as it grows & grows through the night; Donald's transcendent Moscow-Arty performance as a medieval duck driven mad by malnutrition.

The Unsuspected (Curtiz; Warner] is suspected too soon by the audience and too late by most of his fellow actors. The result is a long, lame melodrama about a radio star (Claude Rains) whose secretary is the first to be murdered, and various other people, pleasant and unpleasant, who hang around Rains's mansion hounding the culprit, or just waiting their turn. Among those present: Joan Caulfield, Audrey Totter, Kurd Hatfield, Constance Bennett, Fred Clark.

Magic Town (RKO Radio) is another of those seriocomic fables in favor of the American way of life which, it appears, cannot be made without James Stewart.

This time, Mr. Stewart is a sort of Gallup pollster. Pretending to be an insurance man, he descends on an unsuspecting U.S. town and pumps the townspeople dry of their opinions on everything under the sun. As he pumps, he falls in love with the town and some of its inhabitants, notably Jane Wyman. In turn, everyone trusts, likes or loves Jimmy. But much as it goes against his conscience, he must be true to his job.

It appears that Grandview is The Absolutely Average U.S. Community. The commercial and political implications of being dead average are, of course, enormous. With Jimmy's help, the town gets a swelled head and frantically markets its opinions, which soon become worthless. Eventually, Jimmy shames the financially ruined community into civic pride and resourceful action.

Although Magic Town is not worked out with much acuteness or grace, it views with a wholesome if very mild disapproval: 1) the overwillingness of many Americans to play guinea pig with their private lives; 2) their ugly and pathetic capacity for materialistic vanity; and 3) the ease with which affection and rust can be abused in dedication to a job.

Where Magic Town eventually gets gainfully out of order is in sounding its Note of Hope. Know-how, self-respect and daring are traditional American virtues, but this movie suggests that they can be aroused only by deceit and the pressure of public opinion.

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